Assyrian Merchants Research Articles

キュルテペ文書中の結婚契約から見た女性の地位と結婚形態

This article deals with marriage contracts of Old Assyrian merchants and focusses on form analysis. Its contents can be summarized as follows:1. In his recent discussion of the Old Babylonian marriage, R. Westbrook has suggested that a marriage contract was in fact of “bethrothal contract”. The study of some Old Assyrian marriage contracts in combination with data in some letters and records shows that a similar interpretation is also helpful for the Old Assyrian period. Marriage procedures under the contract by which Old Assyrian traders took a woman as aššatum, “(first and main) wife”, can be distinguished in three stages: betrothal in childhood, engagement, and marriage. The woman in question was called aššatum as each stage.2. It is a well established fact that the community of Old Assyrian merchants also knew a “polygamous” marriage institution. It knew a formal marriage, sealed by a contract, with a woman designated as amtum who, however, was not a slave-girl owned by her husband or somebody else, as was the case in some Old Babylonian “polygamous” marriage contracts (cf. CH §146). Such amtum wives had a spacial legal status.3. The recently published marriage contract kt t/k 55=AKT 1 no. 77 which was indeed a contract of engagement since the final payment of šimu “prices” has not been done and “the face (of the bride) is (still) unveiled”, acquaints us with still another type of marriage. The bride most probably was a qadištum, whose contractual status seems to have belonged to some different category from that of an aššatum and an amtum. This contract reveals that the custom of “veiling” a woman in order to fix her status, known from the Middle Assyrian Laws, was already known in the old Assyrian period. The text also acquaints us with the possibility of a marriage with a woman designated as ša'itum, “(travel) companion”, who seems to have enjoyed a status of ‘lover’ different from that of the aššatum, the amtum and the qadištum.

New Developments About Anatolia's Social History According to the II. Level Documents in Kültepe

It is known that, as a result of Anatolia's entrance to the written period, with the documents belonging to the Assyrians, new inforrnation about the eras political history has been obtained. The Assyrian merchants, who only deals with commerce, never mentioned about Anatolias political, historical and diplomatic events in their documents which doesn't interest and effect them. The correspandence between the Kanis and Mama kings, which have taken their historical place in the 2 nd Level, shows us Anatolia's Colony Period in a most clearly form. Only this document can also give us an idea about the agreements and the disputes between Anatolia's native kings from time to time.

KOLONİ DEVRİ ANADOLU'SUNDA, TARİHİ VE SOSYAL OLAYLARIN ASURLU TÜCCARLAR TARAFINDAN TARİLEME OLARAK KULLANILIŞI

Many tablets used by the Assyrian merchants, following their arrival in Anatolia in 2000 B. C., were found. Most of them were commercial and economic documents. This article studies two distinct tablets which are related to the historical and social life of Anatolia. In the article, their transcription is produced, and business and economic lives of Anatolia are interpreted in the light of the information on the historical and social life of the district.

Hittite Involvement in Western Anatolia

In addition to security considerations, the course of Hittite history can largely be explained by the economic motif, to control the sources and markets of metals.The expulsion or departure of the Assyrian merchants from Anatolia at the end of Anittas' reign not only deprived the newly founded Hittite Kingdom in the central plateau of the organized trade which, among other commodities, supplied Anatolia with its imported tin (from. Assur), but also cut it off from the supply centres in the East Mediterranean and North Syria, by now under the control of the strong Yamhadian Dynasty.In Anatolia itself the mineral-rich regions, which supplied both Anatolian and Mesopotamian provinces with copper, silver and lead, were mostly in the northern and eastern areas which the Hittites, due to the geo-political situation already pointed out by Mellaart, could not control or controlled with difficulty. This situation no doubt forced the Hittites to turn to alternative mineral-fields and supply centres in areas west of the plateau.

KAPADOKYA TABLETLERİNE GÖRE ANADOLU KAVİMLERİ ÜZERİNDE ARAŞTIRMALAR

Cappadocia tablets are found in the Kultepe mound near Kayseri. These tablets revealed information about the commercial organization founded by the Assyrians in Anatolia and hence its economic history, the condition of local people who traded with Assyrian merchants, principles of the marriage law, legal principles they pursued in trade relations, government and its regime, forms of house management and their socio-cultural circumstances, religions, locations of the cities, and the different types of native languages spoken in the region.

Recent Archaeological Discoveries in Asia Minor

Modern scientific archaeology in the Near East began with Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Hissarlik on the Asiatic shore of the Dardanelles, undertaken in the belief that the site of the Hellenistic and Roman town 'New Ilion' was also the site of Homer's 'Troy'. His conviction that the city of Priam which Agamemnon burned was the second from the bottom in the sequence of nine major deposits, because that 'Second City' had also perished by fire, was replaced, immediately after his death in 1890, by the probability that the Sixth City, the importance of which he had overlooked, corresponded far more closely in date and character with the conditions of a Trojan War at the traditional date, about 1200 B.c.; and had in fact some intercourse with the peoples of the south Aegean during the late Minoan decline. But, this point gained, the excavation of Hissarlik was left unfinished, and the definitive publication of it, and of the Schliemann Collection in Berlin (both in 1902), showed, all too clearly, how much was still unknown, especially as to the date and character of the Sixth City. The explorations of Ernest Chantre in eastern Asia Minor in 1893-42 revealed many ancient settlement sites?tell as they are called in Arabic and h?y?k in Turkish?so lofty and with surface finds so various that they certainly were stratified like Hissarlik, and of comparable antiquity; and at Kiil-tepe, south of the Halys-crossing at Kaisarie, Chantre found cuneiform tablets of a kind already reported as 'Cappadocian',3 which recorded transactions of Assyrian merchants at a date not much earlier or later than 2000 B.c. In 1899 the Bos-h?y?k4 mound, and another at Gordion, both close to the new railway, were found to consist of prehistoric settlements. But engineers and archaeologists alike were obsessed with the notion that all mounds were funerary; and the same misconception afflicted even the excavators of the 'Tomb of Protesilaos' at Seddulbahir in 1919.5 In 1902-6 Kiepert's great map of the whole peninsula showed how numerous such sites were. The monumental sculptures on many sites in Asia Minor and north Syria had long attracted attention before Wright and Say ce6 in the seventies argued, from their geographical distribution, that they must be the work of the 'Hittites' of Biblical history, the 'Kheta' of Egyptian documents, the 'Khatti'

The Early Geography of South-Eastern Asia Minor

Thanks to the cuneiform tablets discovered at Boghaz-Keui, the capital of the Hittite empire, the thick darkness which hung over the geography of eastern Asia Minor in the pre-classical age is at last being dispelled. And therewith several questions relating to the culture and history of prehistoric Greece are likely to be cleared up.At Kara Eyuk, also called Kul Tepè, ‘the Burnt Mound,’ eighteen kilometres N.E. of Kaisariyeh and near the village of Manjé-su, many hundreds of tablets have been found written in a West-Semitic dialect, differing but little from the vernacular of Assyria as distinct from Babylonia, and belonging to the age of the Babylonian Third Dynasty of Ur (2400–2200 B.C.). The name of the city was Kanis or Ganis, and it was a Babylonian colony, defended by the Assyrian soldiers of the Babylonian empire, but chiefly occupied by Babylonian and more especially Assyrian merchants, who worked the mines of silver, copper and lead in the Taurus and exported the metal to the civilised world. The great Babylonian firms had their ‘agents’ there; good roads had been made throughout the whole region, in connexion with the trade-route from Babylonia past Nineveh to Cappadocia, and traversed by postmen whose letters were in the form of clay tablets. I may remark incidentally that one of the places from which the copper came was Khalki, perhaps meaning ‘Wheat’-city (Contenau: Trente Tablettes cappadociennes, xvi. 12, 131), which probably gives us the origin of the Greek Χαλκός.